Hurray it's raining! - or it was. Not enough yet. Coming over the volcanic park all was murky - definite signs of season change. Maybe they'll start planting. Fields all ready but no serious sign of it yet. Perceptions by those of us who live here are quite different to perceptions of holiday people. For us, winter cometh, and that has its pleasures. For granny and Beloved, for instance, up in the hills, there's the stove to light in the evenings, very cosy, and much less watering of garden. Visitors, on the other hand, see on this island a permanent summer ; and so there is, relatively speaking.

Arafat dying. Margaret Hassan weeping on another video. No escape from news here - don't think we'd choose it. Granny has been reading a book by an American woman doctor who lives and works in a remote part of the Amazon where there are no such connections. She doesn't regret, she says, getting mostly disturbing news from everywhere about which she can do nothing: she has a point. To take that line here, tho', would require greater discipline than Granny at least can summon. Maybe she's a news junky. Will she retreat a bit in time as her old dad did? You have to be very old, she thinks, for that. Or very busy. Presumably the sense of pointlessness in most of what goes on gets greater and greater. She feels it already. Better to stare out of the window at walls, fig trees, agaves prickly pears, lone palms, hills, white houses. Sea and islands farthest away; spiral made on land by beloved daughter nearest. She does. But still goes looking for the other.

Granny has just been down to the coast to get her ears syringed; but has to go back tomorrow for final act. Will continue meantime to drive Beloved crazy. Blocked ears have bad effect on hearing aid. (You're whistling!) Let alone on hearing.

COME WINTER...COME; she thinks; but after her two weeks in England will, she suspects, be singing a different tune! Grannyp